Kahn Brothers 13F (2026 Q1): Deep Value in the Graham Tradition

One of the last direct links to Benjamin Graham

Kahn Brothers carries a lineage almost no other firm can claim. Its founder, Irving Kahn, served as Benjamin Graham's teaching assistant at Columbia in the 1920s and remained a working investor until he died at 109, one of the last people alive to have learned value investing directly from its inventor. The firm his family still runs practices the discipline in its purest, most contrarian form: buy unloved, beaten-down securities trading well below a conservative estimate of worth, hold them patiently, and pay no attention to what is fashionable. Its 2026Q1 13F, about $564 million across 48 positions, is a vivid snapshot of that philosophy at work.

The single largest holding tells you almost everything about the firm's temperament: Citigroup at 16.91% of reported value, a bank the market has distrusted for the better part of two decades. Behind it sits Bayer at 13.26%, the German pharmaceutical and agriculture giant weighed down by years of litigation, and Flagstar Financial at 9.53%, a troubled lender deep in a turnaround. This is a portfolio built out of exactly the kind of controversy and pessimism that sends most investors running, which is precisely where deep-value investors go looking.

Concentrated conviction in the unloved

The top of the book is strikingly concentrated for a value shop: the five largest positions account for more than half of reported value, anchored by that 16.9% Citigroup stake. Concentration like this is a statement of conviction, the firm is not spreading thin bets across dozens of cheap stocks but committing real weight to a handful it believes are deeply mispriced. Rounding out the larger positions are Disney, Alphabet, and Seaboard, a mix of household names and obscure deep-value situations that is characteristic of the Graham tradition.

The contrarian's quarter: selling pharma, buying deeper into trouble

The quarter's share-count moves are a clinic in contrarian behavior. Kahn Brothers cut two healthcare-and-energy names hard, trimming Merck by 47% of shares and BP by 40%, while leaning further into still-controversial situations: it added 53% more shares of Organon, the women's-health spinoff that has struggled since separating from Merck, and established a new position in Zillow. The pattern is telling, taking profits or cutting losses in names that have had their moment, and redeploying toward businesses the market is currently punishing. That is the deep-value engine: rotate from the less-hated toward the more-hated, where the discount is widest.

Meanwhile the largest positions, Citigroup, Bayer, and Flagstar, were held essentially flat, the patience of a firm content to wait years for a thesis to play out. Reported value barely moved on the quarter, down just 0.1%, and has held steady near $560 million for two years, the signature of a low-turnover manager riding out volatility rather than reacting to it.

How to read a deep-value contrarian

A filing like Kahn Brothers' rewards a particular kind of attention. The holdings will almost always look uncomfortable, banks under a cloud, companies in litigation, spinoffs that have disappointed, because discomfort is the source of the discount. The right question is not "why would anyone own this?" but "is the market's pessimism overdone relative to a conservative estimate of worth?" That is the bet the firm is making, and the concentration tells you how strongly it believes each one. For investors who use filings as an idea source, Kahn Brothers is a window into where one of value investing's oldest lineages currently sees the widest gap between fear and fundamentals.

You can review the full 48-position book, the quarter-over-quarter changes, and the longer history on the Kahn Brothers filer page.